The Book Tour Episode Twenty: Those Met on Buses

 

    We head up through Florida, passing housing tracts, shopping centers, vast properties in pseudo ‘hacienda’style, the ‘ideal world’ of those water-guzzling golf courses kept green by vast quantities of herbicides and pesticides (sometimes four to seven times the average amount used in agriculture), and neighborhoods where runoff and airborne drift from those courses cause nausea, asthma, dizziness, headaches, rashes, birth defects, learning disabilities, infertility, leukemia, brain cancer, breast cancer, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

 

 

People are more raucous on the buses in Florida, and the squawks and rustles of bad headphones are very audible — something bus drivers are quick to condemn elsewhere. The drivers, too, are generally unfriendly, as if acknowledging we are all the bottom of the barrel, as far as society goes: “In Florida, everyone’s all obsessed with cars. Only transients take buses.”

 

 This attitude isn’t restricted to Florida, and it certainly won’t help the environment. Single occupant cars produce 80% more carbon monoxide per passenger mile than buses. Buses also produce fewer hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, and other pollutants. Bus and train travel is one of the best ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, road congestion, and eliminate the great number of animals injured or killed while crossing roads. The need to swallow up even more countryside with new roads would also decrease. However, such a change in the mentality is unlikely: federal investment has always boosted the road system; suburbs and cities are built around the car; people equate car ownership with personal freedom. In Europe, things are slightly different because strong restrictions on land use as well as attractive urban life keep people in cities; and urban growth tends to follow lines of mass transit.

    Fellow travelers are calmer once we leave the state. “Only new drivers try to impose discipline down in Florida,” Martin, our driver tells me. “People down there are spoilt. They have it too easy. Get hungry? Pluck an orange. Besides, everyone’s in a holiday mood. There’s no restraining them. What I usually do, is treat people like little kids. They don’t obey, after the third warning I go over and take away their ‘toys’. Other drivers, they just pull off to the side of the road until the person stops behaving badly. That way, the other passengers put pressure on the offender.”

 

The last time I traveled this way, was back in the 1950s, when, with my parents, we took U.S. Highway Number 1 from Canada to Florida for the annual holiday. I remember seeing dense vegetation along the highway, also rows of cardboard boxes in which people — largely African Americans — lived. By the end of the 50s, one-fifth of the US population lived below the poverty line, and it was a strange sight for Canadian eyes — although, as a child, I thought living in a cardboard box looked like much more fun than living in a normal, banal house.

 

Also strange to Canadian eyes were the separate drinking fountains and toilets: better ones for whites, smaller, dirtier ones for blacks. But, despite the widespread belief that my country was very different from the USA, it was not uncommon for Canadian restaurants to refuse service to people of color. In Windsor, in the early 1950s, the United Auto Workers-Congress of Industrial Organizations filed a complaint against a café that refused to serve a black member of the Canadian armed forces. Race and religion could also prevent Jews, racial minorities, and people of ‘questionable’ nationality from buying and holding land; and in the summer holiday cottage country as well as on beaches in Toronto and Winnipeg, it was common to see signs restricting use by Christians only. My three uncles after studying medicine were forced to do their internships in the

USA because of restrictions against Jews; my father who wanted to start an advertising agency with three Jewish friends in the 1940s could only open one as a branch of a Christian agency. Even as late as 1962, when my non-Jewish friends easily found summer jobs in banks, I failed to do so. My father then told me to state that I was Christian on job application forms: I did, and within a week I was working as a bank teller.

 

I intend to stop for the night in Brunswick, Georgia, but Martin tells me that any reasonably priced motels are around five miles from the bus station. How will I drag my bags that far? “Savannah is better,” he says. So I climb back onto the bus, find myself seated in the vicinity a loudmouth know-it-all who, after a short visit to the British Isles is intent on giving us the ‘facts’ — all of them incorrect. Seated around her is a gaggle of women, all of them fascinated, oohing and awing, taking her word for gospel.

 

“In England, nobody speaks English. Below London, everyone speaks Cockney; above London, they all speak Geordie. There’s this island in Scotland where, when the tide pulls out, it leaves it stranded. The castle there was built by Muslims, but then it was conquered by the Vikings.”

 

“Wow.”

“Imagine that.”

 

What she is referring to, is the monastery (not castle) of Lindisfarne. Dating from the 6th century, this was an important center of Celtic Christianity — whereas Islam only originated in Mecca and Medina at the start of the 7th century. In 793 and 875 Norse raiders (not Vikings) did indeed sack the monastery, and monks abandoned the site. Yes, there is a castle on Lindisfarne, but it was built in 1550 using stones from the ruined priory.

 

The loquacious lady is ready with even more fake news: “The British medical system is way behind the American system. They don’t have important drugs or pain killers, so people just have to suffer.”

 

She’s obviously never heard of Britain’s National Health Service, implemented in 1948. Nor does she seem to know that health care facilities in the United States are largely owned and operated by private sector businesses; that the prohibitively high cost of medical care results in Americans delaying, avoiding, or stopping medical treatment altogether. In 2018, 27.8 million Americans went without any health insurance.

 

On and on she goes, misinforming, deforming, spilling out the falsehoods with all the confidence of a snake oil saleswoman. I think — only very briefly — about intervening, correcting her, but decide this is not the hill I want to die on. Instead, I begin chatting with the rather ancient African American woman by my side — she can’t be bothered listening to big mouth.

“What were you doing down in Florida?”

“My son ‘passed’ there a year ago.”

Is this an explanation? If so, it’s a confusing one. But seemingly untroubled, she goes on to name at least six other children living all over the USA. “I also once worked for the social services removing children from their families — potentially a violent job. You gonna take kids away, parents gonna get angry. But those children I saw… malnourished… abused. Yes, I sure saw some ugly things. What can you do? Laws is laws, and they’re made for everyone so’s you can keep order.”

 

 

Across the aisle is a curly-haired blond wearing huge eyeglasses. Thick black lines of makeup surround her eyes; her purple lipstick bleeds around a mouth with far too many teeth; purple polish adorns the tips of beautiful long fingers. Hers is a tiny Lolita figure, dressed in giddy preteen fluffy pink net ornamented by sparkles — strange clothes on a bus headed for cold climes — yet, she is hardly young, as the grey roots of her hair testify. She is wonderfully strange-looking, fascinatingly ugly, and definitely quite beautiful — what one would call, in French, a jolie laide or a beautiful ugly.

    She is deeply absorbed in a romance, and I wonder what her life is like. Does she dream of true love and passion on tropical islands? Is all that window dressing an effort to find true love? Is she lonely, or does she have an ardent lover who appreciates her efforts?

 

In the end, I discover she is chatty and open. She’s on her way to wintry Cleveland, she informs me in her thick inner-city accent. Tom, her sweetheart, will be waiting for her at the bus station, and he’ll have warm clothes with him — she didn’t want to walk around Miami lugging a suitcase with heavy winter things. Anyway, she wasn’t in Florida for very long: she flew down on Thursday. Now, Saturday night, she’s on her way back by bus, a fifty-hour trip.

 

I must be staring at her in astonishment, but she only smiles.

“I had a great time. I never been to Florida before, and I wanted to see what it was like. Everybody’s always talking about how wonderful it is, and I was dreaming about it for years.”

“Why not stay for longer?”

“Can’t. I work part-time cleaning, and you don’t get no holiday time if you only work part-time. The lady I work for told me if I take off longer, I won’t have a job waiting for me when I get back.” She also has another full-time day job, and she gets a week’s holiday every year — unpaid, of course.

 

I am appalled. Living on a continent where everyone has the right to four or five weeks paid vacation every year, I had forgotten about this aspect of American life. Yet, she’s a delightfully cheery woman, accepting all with good nature. Life is just like that.

 

She is so charming she has me wishing I were a fairy godmother with a magic wand to sweep her into Wonderland. But I’m not. So, silently, I wish her many delightful romance books with happy ends, and I keep her in mind every time I write one.

 

More about my books and passionate life can be found at http://www.j-arleneculiner.com

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